Data

To Set Yourself Up for SEM Success, Set Up Alerts

Posted by Alan Raistrick

February, 2017

Being a successful SEM manager means managing your time well, so you can manage your accounts properly. Setting up alerts can save you time and your client money, by bubbling up important changes in account performance automatically, and sending the info directly to your inbox each morning. They keep you from having to run ad hoc reporting, filtering through spreadsheets or adjusting columns in a table on a website platform. You can set up alerts in bid platforms like Marin Software and DoubleClick, or directly in the publisher interfaces (Google AdWords or Bing Ads).

Of course, having the right alerts matters too. Spend a little time defining a list of alerts that are important for you, and set up recurring alerts that will fire when your data meets the criteria. This frees you up to focus on strategy with your account and triage the problems that pop up from alerts as they come in.

Alerts can be set up to look at changes in data as a percentage change or a value change. They can compare data from a variety of angles, such as “day vs previous day”, “day vs same day last week”, “week over week” etc. Whatever is most important for your business.

Here are the top 5 things I need to know each day and have alerts set up for:

1. No Conversions Reported

a. This report works to alert me if there is an issue with tracking or revenue file transfers from a client where conversion data is completely missing. When there are no conversions being reported in the platform this creates issues for bid optimization.